Red Hat's comments on Draft Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance Version 1.1 dated May 2010

These are the comments that I submitted to Department of Information Technology on behalf of Red Hat on the Draft Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance Version 1.1 dated May 2010. Overall, it is a good policy with a few loopholes that need to be plugged. If approved in a slightly improved form, it will be a huge landmark for e-governance in India and for the open source and open standards community.

General Review Comments

Wonderful is your gift of knowledge
the more we share, the more it grows
the more we hoard, the more it diminishes

Hymn to Saraswati, the Goddess of Knowledge

Information Technology, and the Internet in particular, have opened up tremendous avenues for the sharing of knowledge. In the next two years, over two billion people (or one-third of humanity) will be connected to the Internet, making it the largest collaborative network in the history of mankind. Open standards are the most fundamental tool for the sharing of knowledge and we therefore appreciate DIT's leadership in creating the Draft Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance Version 1.1 dated May 2010.

In creating and implementing the Open Standards Policy, we hope that DIT will live up to the best of Indian knowledge traditions that placed tremendous emphasis on the sharing of knowledge. While genuine open standards foster the sharing of knowledge, proprietary standards prevent the free flow of knowledge by treating standards as a priced commodity or as trade secrets, owned and controlled by private entities. We hope that DIT will make a clear distinction between open standards and proprietary standards because this has larger implications beyond e-Governance and impacts the information society as a whole.

We recognize and respect the fact that DIT has a significant challenge on its hands when it comes to genuine open standards because many standards, currently in use, have evolved as de-facto standards that are proprietary in nature. At the same time, we request DIT to recognize the larger historical perspective, which places standards firmly in the commons; and that proprietary digital standards are an aberration of this norm. It is a well established convention of civil society that standards should be treated as a “common wealth” and belong to all, and NOT be controlled by private entities. If standards that we take for granted – like weights and measures – were proprietary standards that required royalties and OEM licenses for usage, the cost and social impact of the same can well be imagined. For example, multimedia standards are some of the most expensive standards in the world. A complete set of playback plug-ins costs around EUR 28 (approximately Rs 1,624). As we deliver e-government services right down to the village panchayats and seek to put computers in every school, the cost of these proprietary playback plug-ins could prove to be a heavy drain on the country's finances, affect IT penetration in India and thereby hinder the spread of knowledge.

On the other hand, open standards can accelerate the sharing of knowledge and the Internet and World Wide Web are the finest examples of this. For example, in 1994, Sir Tim Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT. It comprised various companies that were willing to create standards and recommendations to improve the quality of the Web. Berners-Lee made his idea available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. The World Wide Web Consortium decided that its standards should be based on royalty-free technology, so that they could easily be adopted by anyone.

It is therefore clear that open standards promote the public good, which is the primary responsibility of any government. The ultimate test of any open standard is – does it give us the freedom to share knowledge without any hindrance, without any terms and conditions? We hope that this is the yardstick that will be used to determine open standards for India.

Comments on Specific Sections

Section 4.1.2 of the policy states, “ The patent claims necessary to implement the Identified Standard shall be available on a Royalty-Free basis for the life time of the Standard. If such Standards are not found feasible then in the wider public interest, Fair, Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (FRAND) or Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (RAND) with no payment could be considered.”

We request that the following statement, “If such Standards are not found feasible then in the wider public interest, Fair, Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (FRAND) or Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (RAND) with no payment could be considered” be moved to the section 4.3 which deals with “Non-availability of Open Standard which meets all Mandatory Characteristics dealing with exceptions.” We strongly feel that this sentence is completely out of place, especially considering that it is currently housed in section 4.1 titled, “Mandatory Characteristics.”

We feel that section 4.1.2 is the heart of the Draft Policy and placing an exception statement in the very heart of the policy will send out wrong and conflicting signals. Also, in terms of sequence, the RAND/FRAND clause pre-empts the selection criteria listed in Section 4.4. It should also be noted that standards that are RAND/FRAND should be termed as “Interim Standards” and should NOT be termed as “Open Standards.”

For example, the H.264-encoded Internet Video format is currently free to end users until at least December 31, 2015. Once this period ends, MPEG LA, the licensing agency for H.264 may start charging royalties. Therefore, H.264 is a partially-royalty free standard, but cannot be considered an open standard because users do not have the freedom to encode and decode data and have to adhere to complex licensing conditions. Under the current wording of Section 4.1.2, H.264 may qualify as a suitable open standard for e-governance but this is clearly unacceptable in the long-term. For example, if Doordarshan uses H.264 to transmit a National Address by the Prime Minister of India over the web on 1st January, 2016, it may attract royalty that “...shall be no more than the economic equivalent of royalties payable during the same time for free television."
Therefore, we suggest, once again, that this sentence be moved to Section 4.4 and be modified to read, "If such Standards are not found feasible then in the wider public interest, Fair, Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (FRAND) or Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (RAND) with no payment, AND NO RESTRICTIONS ON REUSE, could be considered.”

4.3 Non-availability of Open Standard which meets all Mandatory Characteristics

Given the strategic importance of open source and its ability to free India from being technologically dependent on proprietary software vendors, we request that the open source community should have a strong representation in the Designated Body selecting the standards. We request that the process of selecting these Interim Standards should be an open and transparent process that seeks inputs from the public. Citizens should be clearly explained the logic for selecting these standards.

5. Exceptions for Selecting One or More Additional Open Standard in an Area

If multiple standards are selected for a particular area, the government should ensure that data is interchanged without any loss of information. If information is lost in the process of exchanging data, it would defeat the very purpose of having this policy. As with many other policies in India, we are seriously concerned that this exception clause should be used only in the rarest of rare cases and that the exception should not become the norm. Therefore we suggest that this sentence be modified to read as, “Such standard shall be compatible and bi-directionally interoperable, without any loss of data, with the already existing selected Standard.”

Going by past experience, we have seen that proprietary vendors who stand to lose their billion dollar monopolies, are willing to do anything possible to exploit every loophole available to them. Therefore, the constitution of the Designated Body is critically important. DIT must ensure that a transparent process is followed to include multiple stakeholders, including civil society in order to prevent institutional capture of the designated body. The constitution of the LITD 15 committee of the Bureau of Indian Standards is an example worthy of consideration.

Annexure Section m: Maturity -- An standard is considered mature if different implementations, commercial/open, are available, widely adopted and have been stable for some time.

We request that this be reworded to read as, “Maturity -- A standard is considered mature if different implementations in proprietary and open source software, are available, widely adopted and have been stable for some time.” It should be noted that open source software licenses do not differentiate between commercial and non-commercial implementations. The two major development models in the software world are proprietary (where the ownership of the source code is closely held) and open source (where users have the freedom to modify, share and redistribute the source code). Therefore, it would be more accurate to replace the term, “commercial/open” with the term, “proprietary and open source.”

A-I-6 Open Source: The term is most commonly applied to the source code of software that is available to the general public with relaxed or non-existent intellectual property restrictions.

The definition of “open source” is not accurate. There are specific licensing restrictions on Open Source Software. The purpose of these restrictions is to preserve the users' right to share, modify and redistribute the source code. We therefore suggest that the Open Source Definition of the Open Source Initiative be followed. It is the OSI that approves the open source licenses. The Open Source Definition is as under:

Introduction

Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria:

1. Free Redistribution

The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

2. Source Code

The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost preferably, downloading via the Internet without charge. The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed.

3. Derived Works

The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.

4. Integrity of The Author's Source Code

The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of "patch files" with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code. The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software.

5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups

The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.

6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

7. Distribution of License

The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.

8. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product

The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program's being part of a particular software distribution. If the program is extracted from that distribution and used or distributed within the terms of the program's license, all parties to whom the program is redistributed should have the same rights as those that are granted in conjunction with the original software distribution.

9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software

The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.

10. License Must Be Technology-Neutral

No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface.

A-II-6: What is meant by maturity? An Open Standard is considered mature if different implementations, commercial/Open, are available, widely adopted and have been stable for some time.

As with Annexure M, we request that the term, “commercial/open” be replaced with “proprietary and open source.” We would also like to suggest the addition of the following sentence, “The date on which the open standard came into existence will be given priority when it comes to making a choice between two competing open standards.” The reason for this is that an open standard that has been in existence longer is likely to be more mature.

Open Source offers more to CIOs

An edited version of this article of mine appeared in the April 2010 edition of IT Next magazine in India, in their "Moneywise" column. Please feel free to translate, rewrite and publish it in your local geo to promote the message of open source. If this gets published elsewhere, kindly send me a copy/the link.

Open Source offers more to CIOs

“Quality. Price. Service. Pick any two,” said a very succinct placard in Damodar's tailor shop. Back in the days when clothes were tailored, Damodar was one of the best in the business and he definitely knew what he was talking about.

However, in the software industry, the emergence of open source software (OSS) has turned this dynamic on its head. It is no longer about, “Pick any two,” but “Pick ALL three.”

Take quality for a start. Studies by Coverity, have found that the number of defects per thousand lines of code is lower with OSS than with proprietary software. One of the most famous sayings in the OSS community is that “Many eyes make bugs shallow.” The open, transparent, community driven development model of open source has lead to the creation of some of the most robust software systems ever built. Those who have migrated from proprietary server operating systems to open source systems will happily testify to this fact. Is it any surprise that 446 out of the top 500 supercomputers in the world run on Linux? Or that mission critical applications like telecom billing solutions, stock exchanges and others are increasingly moving to Linux and other OSS systems?

On the price front, the industry has had to deal with the forced upgrade cycles, vendor lock-in and hugely bloated software licenses imposed by proprietary software vendors. While the development model of OSS is community driven, many commercial vendors have built business models around service and support for OSS deployments. Many top-notch system integrators around the world routinely incorporate OSS in the solutions they offer to their clients. Unlike their proprietary competitors, OSS vendors do not have to incur huge development costs and this enables them to offer high quality software implementations at prices lower than proprietary software vendors. The good news for CIOs is that OSS is no longer restricted to infrastructure software categories like operating systems and middleware, but has expanded to encompass application areas like CRM, ERP, Business Intelligence, Enterprise Portals, Content Management Systems and many others.

On the service front, everything boils down to how well the software is implemented and supported. In OSS, commercial vendors usually sell their services in the form of annual subscriptions that have to be renewed. The quality of services rendered to the client determine whether subscriptions are renewed or not. This gives OSS vendors an inherent incentive to offer good quality services. Therefore, CIOs should actively consider OSS while procuring software, especially where the OSS option is mature and meets their functional requirements.

Given the recent downturn in the economy, cost has been one of the reasons for more and more CIOs to turn to OSS. However, to be moneywise, CIOs should focus on all three aspects--quality, price and service. It may be tempting to go with OSS vendors who are the cheapest, but CIOs should evaluate the quality of skills available within the vendor organization before taking a final call. As I sum up, I cannot resist quoting from another placard in Damodar's tailor shop. “I have no quarrel with competitors who charge less. They know the value of their goods and services.”

A quick visit to China

I made my first China trip last week and spent two days in Beijing. I explored the possibility of working with the Chinese open source community on policy issues of mutual interest like open standards and software patents. India and China (and other emerging economies like Brazil) are already coordinating with each other on policy issues around climate change, therefore my suggestion seemed practical to the people I met. A longer trip to China is planned for April or May and I hope to work out a more concrete action plan during that trip.

Assam government includes FOSS in state IT policy

Yet another Indian state government made open source an integral part of its state IT policy. The policy is because it mandates open standards and ODF, in particular, which has been advocated open source supporters the open standard for office documents (instead of Microsoft's proprietary .doc, OOXML and other data formats). It also extends beyond software and says that all generic hardware purchased by the government should have support for open source software. The section mandating that source code developed for any State Government body shall be duly archived in a repository, indicates that the policy makers also understand the power of the open source development model. Overall, it is a good policy and worth forwarding to all the government policy makers that we are in touch with.

The full text of Section 3.12 of the Assam Government's state IT Policy says:

(a) The Government would promote use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in all the departments and State agencies, bodies and authorities.

(b) The State Government would promote manpower development and training in use of FOSS, especially in day to day office works.

(c) The State Government would promote imparting training on FOSS in schools and colleges.

(d)Entrepreneurs/ companies using FOSS for application/website development would be given preference over those using third party packaged applications.

(e)All source codes customized/developed for any State Government body shall be duly archived in a repository, and shall be made available freely to other Government departments.

(f) The Government departments and bodies would ensure that Open Document Format (ODF) is adhered to in creating and storing editable documents, data and information and all applications developed by the respective departments adhere to ODF and other Open Standards and are largely independent of Operating Systems (OS) and web browsers.

(g)The Government departments and bodies would ensure that any generic hardware procured has support for multiple Operating Systems(OS) such as Unix, Linux, Opensolaris and other open source platforms.

To download the full text of Assam's IT Policy, click here.

Even slaves were considered property: South African Minister

I re-read the address given by Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi (video), Former South African Minister for Public Service and Administration, at the third Idlelo Conference. This part, especially, gave me goose pimples.

We cannot be in Dakar without being painfully aware of the tragic history of the slave trade. For three hundred years, the Maison des Esclaves (Slave House) on Gorée Island, was a hub in the system of forceful transportation of Africans as slaves to the plantations of the West Indies and the southern states of America. Over the same period people were being brought as slaves from the Malay Archipelago and elsewhere to South Africa. The institution of slavery played such a fundamental role in the early development of our current global economy, that by the end of the 18th century, the slave trade was a dominant factor in the globalised system of trade of the day.

As we find ourselves today in this new era of the globalised Knowledge Economy there are lessons we can and must draw from that earlier era. That a crime against humanity of such monstrous proportions was justified by the need to uphold the property rights of slave owners and traders should certainly make us more than a little cautious about what should and should not be considered suitable for protection as property.

It is good to remember this at a time when organizations aim to justify the privatization of knowledge and ideas under the guise that this is essential for promoting innovation.

In the area of software patents, this is nothing but a land grab, a conversion of was in the commons into a private enclosure.

FOSSCOMM Meeting this Sunday (11th October, 2009)

FOSSCOMM (FOSS Community of India) will hold its third meeting in Mumbai at the Homi Bhabha Center for Science Education, Mankhurd (Near BARC/Anushakti Nagar).

The first meeting held in Bangalore started to process of getting the FOSS Community of India working together. After the second meeting held in Delhi in July 09, FOSSCOMM started making interventions in areas like open standards, school education etc. I hope that the Mumbai meeting will lead to the creation of working groups that will provide leadership to FOSSCOMM's efforts to accelerate the growth of Free and Open Source Software movement in India.

Those interested  working with the community are invited to attend the upcoming FOSSCOMM Meeting on 11th October, 2009.

Dilbert on Patent Trolling

You know that patent trolling has become big business when Dilbert runs a comic strip!

Patent Woes: Speechless about the Word judgment

This is one of the times when you rub your eyes in disbelief, speechlessly gape at the screen and read the same e-mail over and over again. Pranesh Prakash of the Center for Internet and Society forwarded an article titled, "Judge: Microsoft can't sell Word anymore." The article says,

Judge Leonard Davis, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, ordered a permanent injunction that "prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML," according to an announcement by the plaintiff, Toronto-based i4i Inc.

Judge Davis ordered Microsoft to pay $290 million in damages. The abstract of the i4i patent reads,

A system and method for the separate manipulation of the architecture
and content of a document, particularly for data representation and
transformations. The system, for use by computer software developers,
removes dependency on document encoding technology. A map of metacodes found in the document is produced and provided and stored separately from the document. The map indicates the location and addresses of metacodes in the document. The system allows of multiple views of the same content, the ability to work solely on structure and solely on content, storage efficiency of multiple versions and efficiency of
operation.

While I am not a big fan of Microsoft, even I have to admit that this is crazy. But wait a minute! Didn't Microsoft get a patent last week for "Word-processing document stored in a single XML file that may be manipulated by applications that understand XML."

The abstract of the Microsoft patent reads,

A word processor including a native XML file format is provided. The well formed XML file fully represents the word-processor document, and fully supports 100% of word-processor's rich formatting. There are no feature losses when saving the word-processor documents as XML. A published XSD file defines all the rules behind the word-processor's XML file format. Hints may be provided within the XML associated files providing applications that understand XML a shortcut to understanding some of the features provided by the word-processor. The word-processing document is stored in a single XML file. Additionally, manipulation of word-processing documents may be done on computing devices that do not include the word-processor itself.

So, is someone playing tit-for-tat or an-eye-for-an-eye? Mahatma Gandhi said, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." In the weird, wonderful world of digital technology where greedy corporations can convert standards (that should rightfully belong in the commons) into private property, anything can happen.

The Power of Open Source Development

This article of mine appeared in the August 2009 edition of Network Computing's India edition. Please feel free to translate, rewrite and publish it in your local geo to promote the message of open source. If this gets published elsewhere, kindly send me a copy/the link so that I get some sense of how useful this is.

The Power of Open Source Development

Using open source development methodologies, John O'Hara, of JPMorgan developed a standards-based alternative to expensive proprietary middle ware

By Venkatesh Hariharan

Most literature around open source focus on using open source software. While the benefits of OSS are gaining increased recognition, some smart organizations are going a step further and applying the Open Source Development Model (OSDM) to solve problems that proved to be otherwise intractable. OSDM is based on collaboration, community and the shared ownership of knowledge and Linux is one of the best examples of how this model works.

In September 1991, Linus Torvalds released 10,000 lines of source code for Linux and licensed it under the liberal General Public License that gave anyone permission to copy, modify and redistribute the code. The only condition was that anyone making improvements to the software and redistributing the changes had to share the improvements with the rest of the community. This liberal license attracted thousand of contributors over the years who contributed their bit to improving the code base of Linux. A Linux Foundation study found that Fedora, a community Linux distribution has now grown to contain almost 204 million lines of code.

There are two reasons why Linux and other open source software have demonstrated such explosive growth. One is the growth of the Internet, which is the largest collaborative platform in the history of mankind, connecting 1.4 billion people across the world. The other is the open, participative, distributed development model of open source where users are actually encourage to contribute to the development of the software. This is in sharp contrast to proprietary software that allows very limited rights to users.

Some of the most savvy technology users are embracing the participative nature of open source software to build technologies that suit their needs. For example, John O'Hara, senior architect and distinguished engineer at JPMorgan launched AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) as an open source project after being frustrated with developing front- and back-office processing systems at investment banks. “It seemed to me that we were living in integration Groundhog Day - the same problems of connecting systems together would crop up with depressing regularity. Each time the same discussions about which products to use would happen, and each time the architecture of some system would be curtailed to allow for the fact that the chosen middleware was reassuringly expensive,” says O'Hara.

In 2003, O'Hara embarked on a quest to standardize MOM (message-oriented middleware) technology, to enable mission critical enterprise applications to send messages to each other in a reliable and scalable manner. He decided to break from the past by using OSDM to start the AMQP project and sought Red Hat's expertise in governing open source projects. “Red Hat took the lead in establishing the legal framework for the standard; it, too, understood the issues in managing open intellectual property. The key part of doing this is to ensure that everyone contributing has the authority to do so and that there is a paper trail from every potential owner of IP through to the group effort, and that the intent to share is clear even in draft revisions of specifications. The result was a contract that clearly committed the members of the working group to promote unrestricted open middleware through AMQP.” For developing the software, O'Hara tapped iMatix, a boutique European development house that had clearly demonstrated a commitment to open source.
The AMQP project is a perfect example of what Prof. Eric Von Hippel, Professor of Innovation at MIT's Sloan School of Management calls, “user-driven innovation.” In his book, Democratizing Innovation, Von Hippel says that open source software projects are exciting examples of complete innovation development and consumption communities run by and for users. Today, users like Credit Suisse, Deutsche Börse Systems, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase Bank Inc, the TWIST consortium and others partner with IT leaders like Cisco, Red Hat, Microsoft and others in the AMQP consortium.

Ultimately, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. AMQP today has several implementations in open source and proprietary software. Imatix built an open-source implementation called, OpenAMQP. The beta version went live in 2006 and by the following year it was supporting 2,000 users on five continents and processing 300 million messages per day. Today, there are several open source and proprietary implementations of AMQP, including OpenAMQ, the original open source implementation. In a powerfully interconnected world, the open source development model used to build AMQP demonstrates the the power—and value—of collaborative software development.

Delaying tactics from industry associations?

Update: Last week, NASSCOM invited me to meet them and I am trying to work out a suitable date.

I am told that industry associations have asked for more time to submit the views of their members and therefore Department of IT has postponed the next meeting of the Apex Committee to review the Draft Open Standards Policy. The meeting was to have happened on 15th July, 2009 but will now probably be held in August 2009.

Now here is the interesting bit. The industry associations asked for more time so that they could go back to their members and ask for their opinions. And here, I am trying to break down the doors of NASSCOM to submit Red Hat's opinion and what do I get? Dead silence. I hear that their deadline was June 7th and then extended to June 15th and I don't know if there is a new cut-off date. But I do know that despite writing to NASSCOM, I haven't heard back from them.

Is this one more ploy to delay a policy that has already been long delayed?

A (non) conversation with NASSCOM

I wrote to NASSCOM asking for a copy of their submission to DIT on Open Standards. This is their reply and my reply to them. For the record, my reply asking for details was sent yesterday around 4PM. No reply yet on how they submitted an "industry view" without consulting some of us forgotten souls in the industry.

Dear Mr. Hariharan,

Thank you for your email sent to Mr. Som Mittal. NASSCOM has yet to
submit its recommendations to the revised National e-Gov Standards
Policy and we will send them our recommendations once we submit it to
DIT.

Regards,

Dear XYZ,

Thanks for the prompt reply. According to the minutes of the second
meeting of the Apex Committee [1], "Mr. Rajdeep of NASSCOM re-iterated
that government should allow multiple standards at any instance."

The minutes adds that, "Secretary DIT and DG (NIC) suggested that
NASSCOM and MAIT should have an industry consultation on the revised
draft Policy and come out with a collective view ensuring that the
objectives of open standards are fully met and achievable. Both the
members i.e. NASSCOM & MAIT have agreed to do so and suggested to come
back to DIT with the industry view by 7-8th July 09."

Based on the above, I have a couple of questions:

1) Will Red Hat's views be taken into consideration when submitting
inputs to the Apex Committee?

2) What was the process that was followed when Mr. Rajdeep submitted the
NASSCOM's views recorded in the minutes of the second meeting of the
Apex Committee?

As a member, we are seriously interested in the above questions since
open standards is a critical issue for the future of e-Governance and
the IT industry.

We look forward to hearing from you at the earliest.

Prodyut Bora's Blog on Open Standards

Prodyut Bora, Head of the IT Cell of the Bharatiya Janata Party has put up a blog post titled, When Commercial Considerations and National Interests Collide. Bora was one of the main architects of the BJP's IT Vision that supported open source and open standards. Commenting on NASSCOM's push for the inclusion of multiple standards in the Department of IT's Draft Policy on Open Standards for e-governance, Bora says:

[...] the current demand for multiple standards by Nasscom is misplaced. Multiple standards would introduce duplicacy and reduce perfect interoperability between competing products. Whereas a single open standard would remove entry barriers and encourage innovation by small local firms with limited risk appetite, multiple standards would favour market-dominating multinational Goliaths and the Indian software services majors that make money by servicing such Goliaths. Multiple standards would also result in unnecessarily high costs incurred in writing ‘bridge’ code to connect different products, and things like data migration.

It is because of such short-sightedness in the past that we have landed up with a plethora of identity systems—Election ID Card, PAN Card, Ration Card—before finally the wisdom of a unified ID system dawned.

So far, the Government has very wisely thought in terms of an ‘open’ IT ecosystem. But where commercial considerations and national interests have collided, Nasscom very sadly seems to have favoured the former.

I hope that the folks at DIT listen and finalize the policy soon!

Draft on open source standards splits IT industry: Economic Times Report

Economic Times carried a news report on the Draft IT Policy. For the last two or more years while the policy has been in the works, not a peep was heard out of NASSCOM or MAIT. Last month, when the policy was close to finalization, they argued for including royalty-based standards and the use of multiple standards for the same domain. According to the Economic Times report:
[] NASSCOM, the apex body for software companies, is vehemently opposed to the idea of a single and royalty-free standard. “Ways can be worked out commercially to make a large e-governance project viable. Making everything patent-free may not be a commercial proposition as there might not be good standards available. On the other hand, adopting a single standard may constrict the country to adopt an old standard, if a new and better standard emerges in future. We support multiple standards which ensure interoperability at zero cost,” says Rajdeep Sehrawat, VP, Nasscom.
If the Automobile Association of India took a cue from NASSCOM's stand on multiple standards and argued that cars sold in India should have right hand or left hand drives (the choice being that of the vendor, of course) the number of accidents would go up exponentially. Now, if users also demanded their, ahem, "rights," and said, "We should have a choice of which side of the road we should drive on," accidents will go up another exponential level. The point is that standards are collective choices that are imposed upon society for the better of all. I have no choice in deciding which side of the road I can drive on, but my life is better off for it. How many standards do you wish to use? Do you want two different standards for web pages and the corresponding mess of pages not displaying properly? There is only one single HTML standard because the vision of the creators of the web was to unify people, not divide them. The best standards, like HTML and Unicode are those that are universally supported.

NASSCOM's Mr. Sehrawat says, "On the other hand, adopting a single standard may constrict the country to adopt an old standard, if a new and better standard emerges in future. We support multiple standards which ensure interoperability at zero cost.”

Is India "constricted" because we have adopted "old standards" like HTML and Unicode? The world migrated from ASCII to Unicode and is migrating from HTML to XML-based web pages even as we speak. The "multiple standards which ensure interoperability at zero cost" is a nice Trojan Horse to sneak in proprietary standards.

Finally, will NASSCOM's suggestions benefit India? No, because the vast majority of standards are controlled by entities that lie outside our borders. If accepted, NASSCOM (and MAIT's) suggestions will mean that the country will pay huge royalties to foreign outfits. Does anyone remember what happened to us when the British East India Company came to us with a similar proposal?

Last minute dramas around around Open Standards

Now that India's Draft Policy on Open Standards is close to finalization, the usual last-minute dramas are on. In a new twist, I am told that NASSCOM and MAIT have submitted their recommendations, purportedly on behalf of the industry. If this is indeed the case, my organization, Red Hat was not consulted. I also checked with IBM and they too were not consulted. Since Red Hat and IBM have been key players in this area, this is definitely intriguing. I shot off a letter to both MAIT and NASSCOM and a copy of the letter to NASSCOM is reproduced below. It is self explanatory. The letter to MAIT had minor editorial changes but is essentially the same letter.

To,

Mr. Som Mittal,

President,

NASSCOM,

International Youth Centre,
Teen Murti Marg,
Chanakyapuri,
New Delhi 110 021
Phone: 91-11- 2301 0199

Dear Sir,

We have been informed that NASSCOM has submitted its opinion on the Draft Open Standards Policy for e-governance to the Department of Information Technology, Government of India. We have been informed that NASSCOM's submission supports the inclusion of standards under Reasonable and Non Discriminatory (RAND) terms and also the usage of multiple standards in the same domain.

Red Hat has been actively involved in the standards issue and we would like to place on record that we have not been consulted by NASSCOM before this submission was made. We DO NOT support the above recommendations of NASSCOM for the following reasons.

1) Standards should belong to humanity and not be controlled or owned by anyone. In the physical world, we do not pay for using standards like weights and measures. These are norms of civil society that have evolved over centuries and the digital world should be no exception to these norms.

2) In order to protect India's digital sovereignty, we must ensure that national data is stored in formats that are open and free of all encumbrances like royalties, patent claims etc. The Government is the custodian of data that belongs to the citizens of India. It must therefore ensure that this data is not stored in formats that are owned and controlled by anyone.

3) e-Government data like land records etc remain relevant for hundreds of years. If this data is stored in proprietary formats, it will prove expensive for the country in the long-term. It is also seen that proprietary formats are controlled by monopolistic outfits that (a) drive the adoption of a technology (b) file a thicket of patents around that technology and (c) litigate or threaten litigation if royalties are not paid. India must avoid getting into this trap at all costs.

4) For each application area, there must be only a single standard. The use of multiple standards will lead to tremendous complications in the practice of e-governance. Since data is at the heart of e-governance, the confusion created by using multiple e-government standards in the same domain may bring e-governance to a stand still. For example, if different government departments use different standards for document storage, it could greatly slow down or even thwart the process of exchanging files among government departments.

5) Vendors should collaborate on standards and compete on their implementation. The most popular standards like HTML and Unicode are standards that are supported by a vast number of industry players. Multiple standards in the same domain leads to fragmentation. It also helps vendors who can leverage their marketing muscle to drive users towards their own proprietary standards instead of open standards that are created through collaboration and consensus.

6) The Draft Open Standards Policy for e-governance has been in the works for the last two years and several public consultations have been held on this subject. NASSCOM's presence was not visible at any of these consultations and therefore a comment being made at this late stage, when the policy is close to being finalized is surprising. The two recommendations (RAND terms and multiple standards), if accepted, will lead to nullifying the work of the committee that has toiled for the last two years to create this policy because it will land us back to the current status quo dominated by multiple, proprietary standards.

7) We welcome the acknowledgment of open source in the policy. Both open source and open standards are inclusive movements and are therefore closely related to each other. In India, open source is now an integral part of many mission-mode e-government projects and it mention in this policy recognizes its long-term strategic importance in the e-Government sector.

8) We have reviewed version 1.15 of the Draft Policy and would like to place on record our appreciation of the excellent work done by this committee. The Draft Policy does an great job of protecting India's digital sovereignty and avoiding the clutches of proprietary standards. We therefore request NASSCOM's help and support in ensuring that the policy is approved "as is" without any further dilution.

With warm regards,

Venkatesh Hariharan
Corporate Affairs Director
Red Hat

My own little post on Rahul Gandhi

Last week, the papers were full of Rahul Gandhi, and talked about how India's heir-apparent has infused fresh life into the Congress party. When Red Hat chairman, Matthew Szulik was in India in 2005, we had faxed across a meeting request to Rahul's office. The very next day, we got a call confirming the meeting. Javed Tapia, who then headed Red Hat India, Szulik and myself met with Rahul. As an aside, Szulik is a passionate speaker on open source in education and it was one such speech that made me join Red Hat. Szulik updated Rahul on what is happening with open source around the world and tabled a request that the Indian syllabus should stop mandating proprietary software and endorsing brand names.

We spent around 30 minutes with Rahul. During the meeting he spoke very little but listened intently. He agreed with our point that the syllabus should stop endorsing brand names. While he did not speak much, it was clear that he had oodles of charisma, helped along by that famous dimpled smile. The lasting impression was that of someone who is a very pleasant human being, very understated and with absolutely no desire to show off. For that reason alone, I wish him and the new UPA government great success.

PS: In complete contrast was our effort to secure a meeting with the then IT Minister, Dayanidhi Maran. His secretary said that he would grant a meeting only if we promised to invest crores of rupees to set up a development center in Chennai. I conned the secretary into granting us an appointment but the meeting did not add up to anything.

Another one joins the Hall of Shame

I tried to pay my insurance premium online at the HDFC Insurance web site but literally drew a blank. This is the e-mail I sent them.

I am using Firefox 3.0.2 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and am not able to enter data into the "Old Password" text field. Please see the attached screen shot. Can you kindly look into this and have it fixed?

Venky

This is the reply that I got from HDFC Insurance.

Dear Mr. Venkatesh,

Greetings from HDFC Standard Life Insurance Co. Ltd!

With regard to your e-mail, we would like to inform you that our website works on Internet Explorer version 6.0 or higher version. Hence we request you to kindly login to 'My Account' using Internet Explorer version 6.0. It is not compatible on other browsers

We hope to have addressed your query.

Please write to us for any further clarifications you may require.

We assure you the best of our services always.

Warm regards,

Customer Service Officer

This is what I sent to them on getting the above.

As someone involved with the IT industry for 17 years, I would like to point out that using open standards is one of the key principles for good software development. It seems that your web site has been developed using closed standards that work only on one particular browser. That could cause you to lose customers because Firefox, Safari, Opera and other browsers are becoming more popular.

I do not use Internet Explorer nor do I ever intend to use it. I have insurance policies with LIC and Max New York Life and I have never had a problem using their web sites because their sites conform to open standards like W3C (see www.w3c.org). I also use online banking sites like ICICI with my Firefox browser and have had no problems.

To be blunt, using closed standards is sloppy programming practice and it will benefit HDFC Insurance if this is rectified immediately.

Venky

Let us see how they handle this. By the way, what happened to the Linux-Delhi Hall of Shame? I couldn't find it on the Linux-Delhi web site.

Congress government must increase public access to data

One of the Obama Government's objectives is to increase transparency in government and public access to data. Towards this end, it has set up Data.gov.

The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Although the initial launch of Data.gov provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available, we invite you to actively participate in shaping the future of Data.gov by suggesting additional datasets and site enhancements to provide seamless access and use of your Federal data. Visit today with us, but come back often. With your help, Data.gov will continue to grow and change in the weeks, months, and years ahead.

This is the kind of openness that we need to see more of in India. Once data gets into the steel trap of the government, it can be cussedly difficult to extract it. A good case in point is the Indian Patent Office. Patents are supposed to be a monopoly on an invention granted to an inventor in return for disclosure. This disclosure is supposed to help society to build on existing knowledge and avoid reinventing the wheel. Even USA, which is considered to have the most permissive patenting regime in the world, has a freely accessible database of patents at USPTO.gov. However, extracting patents from the Indian Patent Office is like a root-canal operation. My friends inform me that recently it took them six weeks to obtain copies of patents and required several follow-ups and representation to the higher ups.

This is an intolerable state of affairs. As a citizen, the patent information is yours by right. Yet, you have to pay Rs 4,000 to get a copy of a patent. On top of that, you have to supplicate in front of a officer whose salary is paid out of the money that you pay as a tax payer. At several levels, this is a subversion of the original intent of the patent system, which is to increase access to new inventions and ideas. Also, consider the fact that this travesty is happening within the context of a civilization that believes that knowledge shall set you free! This is just one instance of a system that has been perversely twisted to deny citizens access to data that rightfully belongs to them.

While the BJP did not win the elections, one of the proposals that I really liked within their IT Vision was that of replacing the Right to Information Act with a Duty to Inform Act that puts the onus on the government to share information with its citizens. In the long run, I think this is the way to go and with the technology at our disposal, we no longer have excuses to keep public data out of the reach of Indian citizens.

Business Week names Prof. Phatak among India's 50 most powerful

Business Week recently named Prof. DB Phatak among India's 50 most powerful people. For those who know him well, this is no surprise. The citation reads:

An open-source evangelist, Phatak, head of Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology, IIT Bombay, has inspired and helped an entire generation of youngsters morph into thought leaders. One of the most respected teachers, Phatak is always surrounded by his students and has made computer science a much sought-after stream not just at IIT but at other Indian universities as well. To reach out to a larger student universe including rural India, Phatak started Eklavya, an online distance-learning program for the IITs.

As a journalist working for Prof. Phatak, I used to interact often with him because he is one of those rare people loved by journalists for his ability to come up with quotable quotes for any occasion. Later, I worked with him to put together the ekalavya/Red Hat Scholarships program. Prof. Phatak passionately believes that open source can help India as a country and that it offers great benefits for Indian education in particular. It is therefore apt that IIT Bombay is leading a project that aims at Adoption of Open Source Software in Science and Engineering Education under the National Mission on Education through ICT project of the Ministry for Human Resources Development.

Several generations of India's IT leaders have learnt under the tutelage of Prof. Phatak who is a very popular figure in the IIT Bombay campus. Despite his accomplishments, he retains a child-like curiosity and enthusiasm for new ideas and projects. One of the most entrepreneurial professors in India, he has tremendous stamina for work. He is an inspiring speaker and I once heard him address a group of sales and support staff and he was able to captivate them from the word go and talk to each of these groups in their own language.

Once, while he was addressing the Mumbai GNU/Linux User Group I noticed that his belt had a prominent Playboy logo on it. Imagine that, an IIT Bombay professor wearing a Playboy belt. When I pointed this out to him, he nonchalantly replied that the belt belonged to his son who forgot to pack it while leaving. One of his students told me this gem called "Phatak's leaky stack algorithm" and those who have been part of the professor's round table discussions will vouch for its truth. The algorithm goes thus. The first person to enter Prof. Phatak's room gets a slice of his attention. The next person to enter gets another slice and so on and so forth. Since people are always walking in and out of Prof. Phatak's room, the first person (now firmly at the bottom of the stack) finally gets up and leaves.

At the age of 61, Prof. Phatak retains a mischevious glint in his eye, a quality that he shares with another Prof. Isaac, another IIT professor legendary for his absent-mindedness. If you have got tales of Prof. Isaac or Prof. Phatak to share, please post them in the comments. I'd love to hear them.

Prof. Phatak is also an intensely patriotic person. On his web site he says:

Dr. Phatak's dream is to see a resurgent India catching up with the world using Information Technology as the spring board. He hopes to make IT work for the millions of Indians so as to enable them to lead an honorable, comfortable and peaceful life full of love and harmony.

Those who followed the OOXML saga know how upset he was with Microsoft for the extent to which they stooped in their efforts to get India's No vote on OOXML overturned.

Over the last 18 years in the IT industry, it has been my privilige to meet and work with several wonderful human beings and Prof. Phatak is right there at the top of that list.

FOSS for GOI supported project for Power Sector

HS Rai has an excellent post titled, "FOSS for GOI supported project for Power Sector" that I liked very much. I commented on his post and have copied it below.

As a tax payer, I am dismayed so see public money being wasted in reinventing the wheel again and again and again. What we need to build are code repositories for common government applications like treasury, municipal management etc and issue diktats that vendors build their services around these code repositories. In the US, hospitals have been (re)using the VistA (Veterans health Information Systems and Technology Architecture) software developed by the US Department of Veterans Affairs. The source code for this software is available at www.sourceforge.net/projects/openvista . The new American CTO, Aneesh Chopra “gets” what open source is all about:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10142626-38.html

The commonwealth of Virginia is undertaking a variety of
initiatives to improve aspects of governance in areas like health care
and education, said Aneesh Chopra, Virginia’s secretary of technology.

On February 23, the commonwealth will debut the Virginia physics
“flexbook,” Chopra said–Web-based instructional materials that cover
areas of physics in which Virginia’s traditional curriculum is lacking.

The commonwealth partnered with the nonprofit CK-12 Foundation to
provide an open-source platform on which new content can be quickly
published. Virginia officials solicited contributions to the text from
around the country. The contributions were subject to a series of
academic reviews.

“Virginia will have its first physics flexbook for teachers to rip,
mix, and burn and to incorporate into their educational coursework,”
Chopra said.

He said the process was faster than the traditional means of
changing coursework, and it was one example of how a robust information
technology infrastructure was helping the government better serve people.

“You can make information more accessible, collaborate more, and
people can do more to hold their elected officials more accountable,”
Chopra said.

Why are we using old, ancient, pathetically fragmented, hideously expensive proprietary software development models when far superior models exist? I agree that it is time to start a serious campaign and get governments to use the open source development model based on Collaborative Innovation and not just use open source software. My article on Collaborative Innovation is at:

www.osindia.blogspot.com/2009/02/collaborative-innovation-video.html

Thanks for this nice post. If the Indian government takes your advice, it will save thousands of crores of rupees!

Andy Grove: Patents Are Like Mortgage Backed Securities

In one of my previous posts, I had talked about how patents (particularly software patents) are another bubble ready to burst. I also talked about how global patent trolls are now coming to India. Now, Techdirt has an article that quotes Andy Grove, former chairman of Intel and author of the book, Only the paranoid survive, comparing how patents have become like the mortgage-backed securities that caused the current financial meltdown.

The true value of an invention is its usefulness to the public. Patents themselves have become products. They're instruments of investment traded on a separate market, often by speculators motivated by the highest financial return on their investment....

The patent product brings financial derivatives to mind. Derivatives have a complex relationship with an underlying asset. While there's nothing wrong with them in principle, their unfettered use has damaged the financial services industry and possibly the entire economy.

Do these patent instruments put us on a similar road? I fear our patent system increasingly serves those who invest in the patent products... It may be time to use Jefferson's principle as a test and ask if we meet it.

When Andy Grove becomes paranoid about something, you and I better watch out!